CBSO violin concerto is a joy!
30.9.09, (world premiere), Symphony Hall, Birmingham: Leila Josefowicz/CBSO/Oliver Knussen
Duration 20 minutes
Commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with funds provided by the Feeney Trust.
Leila Josefowicz, the CBSO and Oliver Knussen, successfully delivered the world premiere performance of Colin Matthews’ eagerly anticipated new Violin Concerto at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Critics applauded the new work as ‘strikingly original’ and ‘…Beautifully written’.
PRESS COMMENTS
Mysteries abound in a new work to savour
‘The CBSO has the benefit of the Feeney Trust for commissioning music. Since 1955, it has been the inceptor of 48 pieces, among them Tippett’s Piano Concerto. The latest is Colin Matthews’s Violin Concerto, which had its premiere with the soloist Leila Josefowicz at Symphony Hall in an interesting programme conducted by Matthews’s longtime advocate Oliver Knussen.
… I wondered whether Matthews’s concerto might contain hidden significances. Its tone is strangely evocative. The first of the two movements (totalling a little more than 20 minutes) begins dreamily — the tempo marking is Sognando — with iridescent chatter in the background and a high-lying solo line that shimmers like Szymanowski, whose First Violin Concerto Matthews cites as an inspiration. The movement progresses through sections marked Scherzando, Sostenuto and Scorrevole, a sequence whose alliteration hints at secret meaning. The solo instrument is in its top register much of the time; at other times occupied with vigorous virtuoso figuration that is eminently violinistic, for all that Matthews isn’t a string player.
There is a will to melody here, without actual tunes, but the other movement (molto sostenuto) subjects wafting lyricism to the immediate shock of percussive pulsation. Piano, harp and unpitched instruments, including brazen metal pipes and the rare lujon — a wooden box with metal plates, apparently named after the jazz pianist John Lewis — cannot be deflected from their alarming iterations, even when the soloist brings back its initial soaring line, and the neoexpressionist impulse prevails until the end. There is a wealth of savourable orchestral detail, and much of it was clear on this first airing, in a hall whose fine acoustics the composer had in mind. Josefowicz was the most exemplary of soloists. She had memorised the extremely taxing part and projected it with a passion. Not a bar of hers was not imprinted with her personality and thought.’
The Sunday Times (Paul Driver), 11 October 2009
‘…Beautifully written and tailored for the particular singing gifts of the soloist Leila Josefowicz, it pits a high violin tessitura against a spectacularly bespoke orchestra: a multi-divided string section deliberately low on violins, restrained brass (with mellow flugelhorns instead of piercing trumpets), full woodwind, and a fashionably extravagant percussion section which includes instruments one has never heard of, and which in fact one doesn’t hear in performance… The luminosity of Matthews’ violin writing recalls the concertos of Prokofiev and Szymanowski, the orchestral textures and colours recall Mahler and Berg – all composers from the early 20th-century period so beloved of this composer, and who can blame him.’
Birmingham Post (Terry Grimley), 2 October 2009
‘Colin Matthews's new violin concerto, commissioned by the Feeney Trust for Leila Josefowicz to play with the City of Birmingham Symphony conducted by Oliver Knussen, is a strikingly original work, which never does quite what you expect of a violin concerto. The writing for solo violin is fluent and idiomatic, but all of a piece with the musical argument. There's no flashy display, nor a hint of a cadenza for the soloist – this, Matthews was quoted in the programme as saying, would have got in the way of the musical argument. Yet the violin's lines soar eloquently over complex orchestral textures that become increasingly threatening as the work goes on.
The two movements, each lasting about 10 minutes, have their own distinctive logic. The first follows a slow-fast-slow-fast scheme that seems to fulfil all the functions of introduction, opening exposition and scherzo before it evaporates into the ether. The second begins with dogged intensity and gradually gathers speed, bringing back ideas from the earlier movement without ever shaking off the feeling of menace. It's a disquieting work, and concertos are rarely that.
The first performance, with Josefowicz consummately playing the demanding solo part from memory, was outstanding.’
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 1 October 2009
